


Carnival of Carnage

by honorarycassowary



Category: Carnage (Comics), Venom (Comics)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Comedy, It/Its Pronouns for Venom Symbiote, Juggalos, Multi, she/her pronouns for carnage symbiote
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:08:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22322320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honorarycassowary/pseuds/honorarycassowary
Summary: Carnage, Shriek, and Venom crash the Gathering of the Juggalos.
Relationships: Carnage Symbiote/Cletus Kasady, Eddie Brock & Cletus Kasady, Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote, Frances Barrison/Cletus Kasady
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27





	Carnival of Carnage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenospider](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenospider/gifts).



> This is a gift for Bex, who asked for Venom to stop Carnage from doing something hilarious that would cause a lot of deaths. I tried my darnedest to channel the spirits of Larry Hama and David Michelinie and write something appropriately batshit. Merry Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

It was a cramped and unmemorable motel. Cletus Kasady knew he wanted to put it on the map as soon as he saw it. 

It looked straight out of the 50s, classic Americadabra or whatever it was called. Real wholesome kind of place, like Beaver Cleaver would have a picnic on the lawn if the grass wasn’t half-dead. 

He tapped the shoulder of the man driving the car. “Pull over, champ. You’ve had enough practice for now, and daddy wants a rest break.”

The man dutifully turned into the parking lot.

“Now turn off the car.”

The man did nothing.

“Champ,” he said, annoyed. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

**If you have to say that, you’re already repeating yourself** , Red said inside his head.

“That I am,” Cletus agreed. He took his feet off the dashboard and twisted around to look into the back seat. “Sweetcheeks, talk some sense into the boy.” 

Shriek’s right eye shone with anticipation. Her left eye shone with twisted empathy. “Sweetie, listen to the man of the house. You’re being so disrespectful.”

The man’s eyes were leaking tears. Cletus leaned back in his seat. Sometimes a woman’s touch was needed to get through to the real difficult kids. Hell, he was living proof - he wouldn’t have learned half the things he knew about the world without dear ol’ grandma stepping in after his folks kicked the bucket.

“And weak. Is whimpering like that really how we’ve raised you? I want to hear an answer.”

“Pleathe,” the man managed. “Sorry.” 

The words were slurred; Cletus had had to sew his mouth shut with Red’s tendrils to get him to stop his yapping earlier. Guess he’d learned his lesson, because he shut up after those two words. Guess pops had told the truth: what can’t be solved with yelling can be solved with beating.

“Sorry isn’t good enough to make me pay for a room with two beds,” Cletus said. “Guess we’ll need to cut the apron strings and cut you loose.”

The man didn’t even have the decency to look terrified. Cletus has gone to all this effort - torturing him and having Red heal him, using him as a puppet and then letting him almost escape, treating him the same as he’d treated his own slime-and-blood children - and he didn’t even have the respect to play along for his pops and beg. It was a real mood killer, so he cut right to the chase. Red slipped out of his skin through an old cut on one of his cuticles and Carnage tore out his throat. 

“I thought a fellow felon would have more vision,” Shriek sighed.

Carnage kicked the body out of the car and into the drainage ditch. The corpse was warm and obvious - just how he liked it. 

“Not everyone can live down to our standards, doll. Not without a little push from your sonics and my symbiote, that is.”

“Well, then what are we waiting for? Didn’t we stop to turn this place from a Red Roof Inn to a red room?”

“I want to savor this one,” Cletus said. “This place really takes me back,”

“Uh-huh?” 

“It’s the type of place my dad would’ve taken us when we went on a road trip. These old motor lodges are just his type of place.”

“I didn’t realize you got out of the city as a kid,” Shriek said. 

**You never left the city until you were an adult** , Red said in the back of his mind.

_ Sure _ , Cletus thought.  _ But I can just picture the old man here, pulling off the sheets to check for bedbugs and making me sleep on the floor like a dog. It feels real, so who cares if it  _ is _ real? _

“We should go see all your nostalgic childhood spots. You’ve grown up so much since then.”

Cletus laughed. “That’s my favorite thing about small towns - showing them what a real big-city man looks like. Ready?” 

He didn’t wait for a response. He shoved the door to the motel lobby open without a care what was behind it.

“Hey, gramps,” he said to the front desk clerk. 

“Can I help you?” the clerk asked sharply.

“Me and my girl are looking for a room,” Cletus said, inspecting his filthy fingernails and blatantly not cleaning them.

The clerk rolled his eyes. “Don’t you have a van to sleep in?”

Cletus and Red felt an identical thrill of delight. The gutsier they were at the start, the more they were at the end, even if Carnage disemboweled them.

“Uh, no?”

“It would be closer to the festival,” the clerk said. “And we charge a $500 flat rate for cleaning rooms with smoke damage, plus a $50 surcharge for each person beyond the first two who stay in the room.”

“Festival?” 

“The facepaint club.” The clerk pointed at Shriek’s face. 

Shriek glanced at Cletus. He nodded, and Red rose out of his pores and sank her tendrils into the clerk’s arm. He choked, his mouth moving silently and helplessly like he was screaming as she slipped into his bloodstream, bonding to him and putting him under Carnage’s thumb.

“A music festival, huh?” Cletus said as Red dug through the clerk’s memories for the location. “Just like old times. You feel like you can take the sonics?” 

“I’ll take care of that,” Shriek said. “My sound manipulation isn’t a one-way street. We just need to get in.”

Abruptly, Cletus broke out into laughter.

“What is it?”

He turned to Shriek and grinned, letting Red pool out of the blood vessels of his eyes into a paint-thin mask, a simplified version of their face as Carnage. “Don’t worry about disguises. These losers sing about death and carnage. We’ll blend right in and show them the real deal.”

*

It was a cramped and unmemorable bus. Eddie Brock wanted it to stay that way.

It was a long ride from New York to San Francisco. The group of friends behind him was having a loud and animated discussion about how likely it was that someone named Mikey would actually try beat their faces in once they got to their destination like he’d threatened to over some inane social media outlet, and how likely it was that Mikey had fought in anything but a Pokemon battle in real life, which prevented him from sleeping. He was used to the physical discomfort, but he was acutely aware of the monetary discomfort such a large purchase would put him in. Not that Eddie Brock had been monetarily comfortable for a long time, but it was a matter of degrees - and he had just recently had a windfall of sorts.

He slipped his hand inside one of the pockets of his symbiotic coat and felt the comforting weight of the three hundred and nineteen dollars in cash remaining from what he’d stolen from the desk of New York’s twenty-seventh most corrupt CEO. Or Ex-CEO, once Venom had gotten their teeth into him and his business dealings. 

His other pocket held a perhaps more important resource: his supply of Three Musketeers and Planters Peanuts. Everything his other needed for a balanced diet.

“It’s been too long since we’ve been home,” he murmured into the empty air of the aisle.

His other responded in agreement, skimming through memories of the homeless settlements they had almost found peace in. The people of San Francisco ignored the homeless, for the most part, and his other longed for that anonymity; the way passers-by deliberately averted their eyes was a sweet relief from the panopticon of scientific facilities with their glass-walled prisons. 

Eddie felt a swell of love in his heart for his shadowy soulmate from the stars. “I know,” he said. “Only there can we feel like we’re truly among our own kind. The destitute, the wronged, the abandoned innocents - our people.”

His other squeezed his liver in a gentle display of affection. It asked what they planned to do once they got to San Francisco. 

“We’ll visit all our old haunts and clear out the vermin. Make a homecoming party out of it.”

His other entered a reverie of sensory comparisons between San Francisco and New York rats and how they felt beneath its teeth.

Eddie chuckled. “I would never deny you the sweet taste of  _ Rattus rattus _ .”

They might have stayed dreaming of sweet revenge, visions of sweetbreads dancing in their head, if the jolt of the bus pulling into the station hadn’t made a skinny teenager heading towards the back of the bus bump into their knee and spill soda all over their lap.

“Oh shit,” the teen said. “Sorry, man.”

Eddie shot him a venomous glare. His other slipped through his mind and its store of Spider-Man’s memories and began whispering its evaluation of this man. Fool, druggie, petty criminal. A leech draining the people around of their naivety through pure incompetence rather than malice, just as surely as Spider-Man had destroyed their own innocence through his bumbling attempts at heroism, Eddie decided. 

“I, I don’t have a napkin. I have my shirt? Hold on a second.” The teen screwed the cap back on the bottle and gripped it with his knees as he shrugged off his ratty flannel button-down, leaving him in just an undershirt. He tossed the shirt to Eddie just as the cap came loose, soaking Eddie and the shirt.

“Oh, shit,” the teen said again. He pulled the shirt back, as if he could take back the last ten seconds. The shirt dribbled soda accusingly down his jeans.

Eddie rose to his feet. The teen backed away.

“This is the kind of careless and utterly maladroit way you behave on a public vehicle?”

“Uh,” the teen said.

“Look at what your lumbering disrespect for others has done!” Eddie gestured at the soaked seats and the puddle of soda slowly spreading down the aisle. His other absorbed some of the liquid that had spilled onto it. It passed back a verdict of “tasty”. Eddie ignored it. “Our rest has been disturbed!”

“You mean your creepy conversation with yourself?” the tattooed man sitting across the aisle asked.

Eddie glowered at him, his irises darkening to the inky blackness of his other’s recondite shadows. 

“It’s none of your business how we conduct ourselves in our leisure time.”

“‘We’? You and who?”

“Hey, lay off, both of you,” called a young woman in a fishnet top from the row behind them. She had pulled a towel out of her backpack and tossed it to the soda-spilling teen. He recognized her voice - one of the people who’d kept him up talking about Mikey. Hmmph. Apparently her travelling companions had a similar level of regard for others’ space. 

“If you cool down, I’ll give you my second towel,” she said to Eddie.

“Why?”

Eddie looked back at the girl and her group. It was more than just her and the teen; there was a group of young people in various stages of disarray and disrobement, complete with face paint irritatingly reminiscent of his other’s black and white. 

“We’re juggalos. Everyone’s family.” the skinny teen with the soda added, as if Eddie saw self-created categories as anything but a veil over the true categories of innocent and guilty, protector and victim and predator.

“We have no desire to associate with any assemblage that calls themselves anything so reminiscent of gigolo,” Eddie said.

“Hey, fuck you,” the woman said. “We’re trying to help.” Her friends added a series of agreements and whoops.

Eddie took a step forward. As soon as he did his other prodded him in the back of the brain, and Eddie instinctively turned. He found himself face-to-baldpate with the bus driver. He was a stocky man in his mid-forties, a good two heads shorter than Eddie.

“Are you going to settle down, or do I need to expel you?”

“How you gonna kick us off? By the power of Greyhound? You got the power?” called one of the facepainted teens.

“Shut up,” hissed the woman in the fishnet top. 

The bus driver sighed. “You all need to get off.”

“But this is just a connecting stop for me,” Eddie said, suddenly alarmed at the thought of having to delve into his meager savings again. 

“End of the line for us,” drawled the woman.

“All of you get off,” the driver repeated.

Eddie glared at her. “This is a public vehicle,” he said to the driver. “I was merely discussing - ”

“Sir, this is a Greyhound bus. It’s private. Now get.”

Eddie bridled at the tone, but his other curled reproachfully around his intestines. “Fine,” he said, and stalked off the bus.

The teens clambered off behind him in a mess of sticky whooping. 

Eddie Brock strode down the street, determinedly keeping to the right-hand side of the sidewalk without a care for who they bumped into.

“The self-destructiveness of the youth of today,” he muttered. “Destroying their bodies with drugs and junk food and their minds with junk music.” He doubted they even knew a word of Sinatra, beyond his overcommercialized Christmas drivel.

His other prodded at his mind again and pointed out that the teens were walking in the same direction as them. 

“A fight?” Eddie asked his other. It flexed against the inside of his skin in disagreement. “A shame,” he said. 

It replied with a rebuke. 

He sighed. “No, you’re right. The children of today may be spoiled, but I was wrong to spoil for a fight.”

His other squeezed his hand in his pocket.

“Of course,” he continued, “There still may be a chance to teach them something, if not by putting them through the school of hard knocks.” In response to his other’s silent question, he continued. “If we were wrong and they are innocents, then surely we have a duty to teach them how to dissuade would-be bullies like this ‘Mikey’. It could even serve as an apology.”

It was practically effortless to tail the teens. They were Venom! They had honed their skills by solving the New York supervillain scene’s stickiest, wall-crawling problem - keeping pace with Spider-Man long enough to find his home. 

Their destination claimed to be a music festival, though they had their doubts even after slipping inside invisibly. In his more Catholic days, Eddie had disapproved of music festivals on general principle; in more recent years, it was the tendency for his homeless allies to be driven away or blamed for festival-goers’ crimes when the city wanted to neaten up its streets for a few days.

They strode through the mess of tents. His other reached out an invisible tendril and stole a cup of unidentifiable soda from the back of a pickup. It tasted disgustingly purple rather than grape, even filtered through his other’s senses. His other flicked a defiant sense of pleasure into his brain.

His other folded itself into what it judged an appropriate outfit - jeans and a brightly colored shirt. “Excuse me,” Eddie said to a passing man, confident that his other would keep the teens in its sight. “Do you know a ‘Mikey’? We’re looking for him.”

The man’s eyes darted around, as if he was looking for a second person for some reason. “I know about twelve,” he said at last. “But you look like you should talk to Wrestling Mikey over at the ring. It don’t matter if he’s the Mikey you want, he’s the Mikey you need.”

Wrestling Mikey sounded like a likely candidate for beating faces in, Eddie thought. Maybe he’d even get a few hits in on Venom.

That was when he saw them. 

His prodigal spawn and his would-be sonic slavemaster of a girlfriend were getting out of a pickup truck like maggots falling out of an open wound. His eyes narrowed - the driver’s unnatural stillness. Another victim of Carnage’s cruel whims.

“Destiny,” he muttered. “Our actions on the bus were no mistake - no rash misstep requiring an apology. We were meant to be here, and they were meant to be dead!”

“Uh, what?” the man he was speaking to said, but Eddie paid him no mind. Their clothes and skin were already melting away like hot tar - Eddie Brock was gone, and in his place was only Venom.

*

Cletus Kasady made eye contact with Eddie Brock in the split second before he disappeared inside his symbiotic suit and nearly jumped for joy. He was an irritant, sure, but he’d done some of his best work when the old man was around. 

“Hostages, babycakes,” he told Shriek, and spun to grab a passing chick in a fishnet top. 

“Hey!” she cried. Shriek had draped herself over the girl’s companion, a skinny teen in a white undershirt and a damp-looking flannel shirt Cletus judged to be stained with at least three flavors of Faygo and two bodily fluids. “Put me down!”

That was when Venom crashed through the spot she had been standing and slammed into the pickup.  _ That _ set off the car alarm, and the sound made Red spasm inside Cletus’s blood. The face paint she’d formed over his face dribbled down his chin, and he dropped the girl just as the wave of pain passed.

Dear old dad screamed. Cletus was going to put it down to the same wuss tendencies that left him gasping Carnage’s name when he’d tried to toast ol’ pop-pop like a s’more, but he looked up to see Shriek had flung her arms as if to shield him. She looked wide-eyed and terrified. Seeing her on-jen-oo act was almost as sexy as seeing her take an icepick to the people who bought it. 

“Stop!” Shriek said. “We haven’t done anything to you!”

“Silence!” bellowed Venom. “We know this is your handiwork!” 

Half the onlookers were fleeing, and the other half were hanging back to gawp and film the whole encounter. Cletus rolled his eyes. His old cellmate may have eaten, drunk, and shat self-righteousness, but he couldn’t play to a crowd to save his life. The tall, dark, and homicidal act only got you so far - if they were keeping score, Cletus had been to way more prisons. He was starting to get a sense of how Shriek was shielding him and Red from the sound and beaming it all back on Brock, like she was using an umbrella to fend off a water gun.

A pair of police officers forced their way through, guns already drawn. Cletus would’ve thought that the first rule of music festivals was not to snitch to the cops, but apparently somebody didn’t have basic manners. The cops’ eyes were wider than Shriek’s, and unlike her, they weren’t acting. It was pitiful. Venom had bark and bite, but it was so easy to rile him up and make him somebody else’s problem.

Except those cops were that someone else, he realized. Sucked to suck.

“Somebody stop him!” Cletus yelled. It was so fun to play the victim and stir up chaos. Eddie was crazy, but it was always fun to make him look crazier. He’d gotten some good mileage out of that even back at Ryker’s, and right now, nude and snarling and covered in half-melted symbiote, he was sure you could get a jury to declare Eddie Brock non-human.

One of them did have the presence of mind to draw a taser instead of a pistol. He must’ve seen Carnage’s “death” by electrical transformer on the 5 o’clock news. He shot Eddie with the taser darts just as some clown decided the best thing to do was throw a half-empty cooler of Faygo and assorted other liquids at Venom. The cooler exploded against his still-symbiote-shielded skull, soaking him and knocking him to the side, so that the cop’s shot struck him in the chest.

Cletus couldn’t have asked for a better present if he’d managed to kidnap Santa himself. It was perfectly pathetic. Beat by a cop in some shitty town with the help of cheap soda. If he’d been designing an ideal defeat for his pops, it’d’ve had some little girls getting in punches and ended in Brock being slowly tortured to death, but the day was still young. He couldn’t even watch the rest of the arrest through the tears and laughter.

“Are you okay?” a woman asked him. It was the girl he’d grabbed. He’d been planning to cut her throat and mock Venom for being too slow to play keep-away, but he could roll with sympathy. She looked like she was in her late teens or early twenties, with a fishnet top and poorly dyed hair. “You saved us,” she said. “I would’ve been slit open if you hadn’t grabbed me.”

“Just instinct,” Cletus said, imagining how sweet it would be to see her arterial spray.

“I’m Bianca,” she said. She pointed at the teen boy Shriek had latched onto. “This is Donner. You set up yet? Donner’s got some molly he brought to spike the Faygo if you’re family.”

“Back off - we’re a matched set, kid,” Shriek said. “I’m the madwoman he’d like to fuck.”

“Atta girl,” Cletus said, grinning. “I’m her DILF - where the D is for domestic terrorist.”

Donner whooped, apparently appreciatively. Bianca echoed him.

“Not my goal,” Bianca said. “We’re family.” Shriek noticeably perked up at her words. 

“You been here before?” Donner said. “This is Bianca’s fourth time. My second.”

“We’re first-timers,” Cletus said. 

“Wow,” Donner said. “I wouldn’t have guessed. Your paint looks  _ fresh _ for a new ninja. How do you get the patches to stay so clear?”

“Blood, sweat, and tears.”

Red snickered inside his head.

Donner frowned. “No, really. I don’t wear paint ‘cause I’m so bad at putting it on.”

“You could say it’s his superpower,” Shriek said, smirking.

“We’re here with our friends,” Bianca interrupted. “We’re gonna meet this guy Mikey, says he has an in with the wrestlers.”

“Never been a big fan of wrestling,” Cletus said. “I couldn’t stand the scripts. I needed something with a bit more life to it, something that really gets the blood pumping.”

“Mikey’s stuff is the real deal,” Biana said, eyes glowing. “There’s blading and real fighting moves, and I’ve seen him post pictures of head wounds online. Like, we’re all ninjas, but he knows the real Naruto shit.”

Donner whooped in his ear, and Cletus had a sudden vision of pulling out his and Bianca’s vocal chords as he watched them high-five. 

“Sounds fun,” he said.

“How’d you get your paint on?” Donner asked Shriek. 

Cletus tuned out as Bianca led them to Mikey’s truck. He didn’t know or care what made Shriek’s face white, and he didn’t plan to start learning nothing about it now. It was like his dad had always said: if a woman made her looks your problem, make them her problem right back. He’d still put Cletus’s head through the door for taking a knife to his classmate’s face, but Cletus held to the advice despite his dad’s hypocrisy.

Mikey turned out to be a tall, bearded guy with multiple eyebrow piercings. Unlike Donner and Bianca, he’d apparently mastered the art of “literally just painting your face white”. It made his age hard to judge, but Cletus guessed he was closer to his own age than to Donner’s.

“New homies, Bee?” he yelled.

“Hell yeah,” Bianca called back. “First-timers. Wanna baptize them?”

Mikey flicked his wrist, sending splatter of Faygo onto Cletus’s face. 

**He’s going to have to die painfully,** Red said. 

Shriek laughed and grabbed the bottle out of his hand, then emptied it over Mikey’s head. 

“This one’s got the spirit!” Mikey said. Bianca and Donner started another chorus of whoops, which was picked up by passers-by. “And you’re only a first-timer? How come you haven’t been here since the start of the Carnival?”

“My man and I, we’re both total free spirits,” Shriek said, flicking her wet hair out of her face. “Took us some time to work our way over from the coast. We paint up to look like criminals because we’ve never been treated like anything else, but all we’re doing is try to make sense of the world.”

“Hear, hear,” Mikey said. Donner whooped again. Red imagined wringing his neck like they did her favorite documentary on chicken slaughterhouses. 

“Well, it won’t be like that here,” Mikey continued. “We don’t judge, and we don’t rat out our own. You coming to the show tonight? Seeing thousands of juggalos and juggalettes cheering to the beat as the blood flows, it’s magic.”

“I’ll bet,” Cletus said. “It’s gonna be something special.” 

Mikey might as well have asked Cletus to load a gun for him to play Russian Roulette. He hadn’t had a setup this sweet since before even Dr. Pazzo. People just saw the fangs and the blood spatters and made all kinds of assumptions. He could’ve just been saving puppies from being painted red like Clifford. It was all down to stereotypes; they saw the red hair and the knives, heard the Southern accent and the repeated threats and then called the police. They’d even said he smelled like a corpse, not that that would stand out at a music festival. Maybe this really was a more accepting place.

“Your first time is always special,” Mikey said, snickering at his own joke.

“You can be our mentors,” Shriek said. “Like our festival parents. But you’re so young, so we can be your parents too on the outside.”

**We’re having a regular family reunion,** Red rumbled.  **And the family tree is a circle, which I’m sure these two are used to.**

_ With any luck we can turn it into a funeral _ , Cletus thought to her.  _ They always have the best food. _

**These people are so oblivious. It’ll be a buffet.**

*

Venom made eye contact with the officer and glared.

They were being held at gunpoint. So dreadfully irritating. They’d cuffed him and dumped him in a cell without a formal booking, in total violation of the police procedure Eddie Brock had familiarized himself with as a reporter.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the one on the left said shakily. He was young, blond, and freckly - they’d eaten more than their fair share of pigs identical to him. 

They peeled back their symbiotic suit and wiggled Eddie’s fingers obligingly. The cop shuddered at the alien flow of their biomass.

“Every moment you keep me here is a moment Carnage’s plans advance. He absconded from prison with the express intention of recidivating.”

“Uh huh,” said the one on the right. He was brown-haired and bearded. Older, too, and he had a look in his eye like he’d spent the last decade of his life daydreaming of getting a chance to play Punisher on a big-city villain.

“Murder, you dunderheads,” they growled. “Carnage will slaughter everyone at that festival.”

“The only thing they kill in there is good taste,” said the younger cop. 

“Carnage wouldn’t come within two hundred miles of this place,” the older cop said. “And even if he did, he’d be doing us a favor. Hell, if I’d been there when you got taken in, I’d’ve let you clean the place up a bit. It’s worth a reward, if you ask me.”

Venom swelled in outrage. “You are that suggesting we kill innocents? That we kill for hire?”

“They dress like strippers and gangbangers, they ain’t innocent.”

“Shut up!” snapped the younger cop. “You idiot, just keep your gun on - “

Venom broke open the bars to his cell and effortlessly tossed them to the side, impaling the younger cop and cutting off his last words.

The older cop screamed. He fired off a round of shots into Venom’s chest, sprayed trails of green slime across the wall. Venom grabbed him by the front of his uniform and slammed him into the wall, their claws sinking into his chest.

“Please,” he gasped. “Don’t kill me, I’m, I’m innocent.”

“You are the epitome of self-delusion!” Venom snarled. “If you refuse to protect the innocent, then you are proven guilty!”

One twist of the neck later, and they tossed the decapitated head over their shoulder in the trash can. Behind them, they heard the thunder of feet and a new voice yelling, “Freeze!” Venom ignored it, cracked their knuckles, and punched through the wall.

“Now down to business,” they said, turning invisible as they leapt across the street. “Reminding Carnage that we brought him into this world and we have sworn to take him out of it.” 

*

The wrestling stands were packed. But for an event called Bloodymania Chaos, it sure was boring. He wanted blood, and all he was getting was a low-key headache from Red’s discomfort with the noise.

**Old man.**

_ Ungrateful millennial parasite. _

There were whoops, cheers, and more speakers playing songs than Cletus cared to count. It put him in mind of his old metalhead days, and he was hit by a wave of nostalgia for the first time he realized his friends saw nihilism a little differently than he did. The arguments they’d had when he tried to change their minds … he’d learned so much about at-home lobotomies that day. But he’d changed so much since then. Now he had two girlfriends at his beck and call who could bring anyone to heel. 

He leaned over to Shriek and hissed, “Let’s make like an icepick and get to the point.”

She turned away from her conversation with Bianca. “What point? We’ve hardly been here six hours.”

“I’m talking turning screams of joy into screams of pain! Our raisin d’entree.”

“For  _ you _ , maybe. I want a family. These kids have got potential, they just need a little breaking in. I’ll give them a few hits of my song to get them hooked, and the only head-banging they’ll want to do anymore will be with a sledgehammer.”

Cletus looked pointedly at Donner. “You think that twig has potential?”

“Him, Mikey, Bianca,” Shriek said. “I know a thing or two about what it’s like to go from homeless to homicidal. I want to do wrong by them before someone else does it for me. That’s what family’s for.”

Cletus sneered. “Your real family is your blood family - the family you let bleed out so they can’t disappoint you anymore.”

The crowd roared. Cletus looked up to see Mikey run out on stage. “I know,” he said. “We’ll bring our work to the kid and see if he’s a keeper.” 

“Clete!” Shriek called, but he was already elbowing his way through the crowd down to the ring. Red impaled the feet of people who moved too slow on her tendrils. It was just a hop over their downed bodies, a skip past security, and a jump over the ropes from there. 

“Heya!” he said.

“What the fuck?” Mikey said, turning. “What are you doing here?” Mikey’s opponent was frozen on the opposite side of the ring; he’d had a view of Cletus’s approach that Mikey hadn’t.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” Cletus said.

“What the fuck did you do?” Mikey said, finally processing the chaos behind Cletus.

“Oh, nothing really,” Carnage said, Red melting down through his lips and gums to form fangs. “Just living up to my name.” He whipped a tendril through the air, slicing through Mikey’s opponent’s throat. “That’s your cue!” he yelled at the audience. “Go wild!”

For a fraction of a second, there was silence. Nary a whoop in the house. Then a man with a neck tattoo of an axe tried to bite out the throat of the man next to him. The screams started like a New York Phillies symphony concert.

Carnage laughed himself halfway sick.

“This is all your fault!” gasped Mikey.

“Aw,” Carnage said. “It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault.” He grabbed Mikey by the shoulders and pulled him upright, forcing to look away from Carnage towards the carnage. “Now, you pay attention to old Carnage - it’s nobody’s fault. This is just what people want deep down. The great Circle of Life has begun.” He cradled Mikey’s face. “But you see, not all of us arrive together at the end.” 

Then he stabbed Mikey in the gut and pulled out his intestines.

“Does your tummy hurt?” he asked Mikey’s gurgling body, patting him on the head. “That’ll go in time, little fella.” 

“Clete!” Shriek shrieked. She descended from the stands with a terror-paralyzed Donner and Bianca bound with her sonic powers. She hovered over the stage and tossed them out of her sonics onto the ground.

“Yeah, honeypie?” he said, rocking back onto his heels.

“I liked that one. I  _ told _ you.”

He shrugged. “So? He wasn’t the right material for a new Champ. ‘Sides, you’ve got your souvenirs right there.”

“No,” Shriek said. “He was like a brother. I wanted to make a new family here - “

Cletus saw red. “Oh, he was ‘like a brother’, huh? Well, I know what that means - first it’s like a brother, then it’s like a step-brother, then you’re just fucking!” He advanced on her. “I wasn’t born yesterday, sweetums, and you need to know your place is in the slaughterhouse.”

He grabbed Mikey’s half-made corpse and threw him. It flew out of the ring and took out two groups of brawling juggalos with a wet thunk.

Shriek clenched her fists. “He was  _ mine _ .” 

“Just think of him as the accident baby daddy made mom give up to social services,” Cletus said. “He was never your real family, no matter how much you begged daddy to keep him.”

“Carnage!”

He ignored Shriek’s follow-up and grinned even wider. “Daddy-o!”

*

The wrestling stands were slick with viscera. Bloodymania Chaos was living up to its name. Everywhere Venom looked, there were clowns fighting. The rivers would flow grey with grease paint in the morning. They kicked apart a pair trying to slit each other’s throats with mall-quality kunai.

“Shriek,” they growled, and leapt into the ring. The woman in question was crouched over a body in one corner, clutching his hand. Two familiar-looking teens cowered behind her. The punks from the bus, the ones who’d gotten them into this mess in the first place.

“Hey, pops!” Carnage yelled, intercepting them before they could reach her. “Like it? I made sure there was a lot of color. It’s real chay-oss now.”

“It’s pronounced kay-oss, you blithering fool,” Venom snarled, dripping green slime onto the tattered ropes. “And if the best you can do is use Shriek for cheap heat, Carnage, you’re even more pathetic than you were when you were rooting at your mother’s grave.”

Carnage’s tendrils writhed and lashed. “You never did appreciate art,” he said softly.

“You’re all repetition and no creativity, Kasady. Just like your horrid music, you’re all one note that tries to cover its deficiencies with screaming.”

“It’s your fault, pops. You know what they say - spare the axe, spoil the child.”

With that, Carnage threw a hatchet at their head.

Venom dodged with a muttered curse. “Where did you even find that?”

Carnage laughed. “Get with the times, pops. It’s a logo. Sure, I’m helping the lovely folks here get their hands dirty, but the least I can do is use their songs as inspiration. It ain’t hard. I already stab four, five people every day.”

Venom sneered. “Your motives are utterly transparent. You find a group outcast from society and purport to be inspired to kill by their subculture. You’re plagiarizing yourself, Kasady - I was there for Anthrax and for Carnage Unleashed. By your own admission you aren’t inspired by their work, you simply co-opt it to legitimize your twisted urges. It’ll discredit them, but you take sick pleasure in tainting the comfort of others with your very presence. I’ve known that since I first heard you open your mouth.”

“You’ve got me all worked out!” Carnage said. He formed another axe out of his symbiote’s biomass. “Too bad it doesn’t matter. Shriek - tag the crowd in!”

Shriek swung her gaze towards Venom. As she did, every brawling clown in the arena turned with her.

“Remember, they’re innocent,” Carnage said, wagging a finger at Venom. “You wouldn’t want to become a foul serial killer like yours truly, would you?”

“Beat the fucking chicken’s head in!” shouted one heavyset clown clutching an aluminum bat. He clambered into the ring behind Carnage with surprisingly agility and rushed towards them. Venom fired a strand of webbing into the rafters and leapt. Like it or not, this man was a victim of circumstance as much as they themselves were. 

“Nope, nope, nope!” Carnage said, sending a spray of superbly honed shards of symbiote into the air, slicing the cord and sending Venom crashing into the ground. “Where’s the spirit? Where’s the will? You want to talk plagiarism, your whole act is a ripoff of ol’ webhead! You don’t get to swing off and sob about how I’m challenging your moral code. Between him and the Scarlet Spider, I’m past my limit for that.”

He gestured at the clown with the bat. “Look at this ninja. He’s a loser in the real world and his ‘family’ are just holding him back. We’re setting him free.”

The clown swung his bat with all his might into the back of Carnage’s knee. Carnage let out a surprised cry and fell to his knees.

“Family’s just holding him back, huh?” Shriek said. She fired a sonic blast at him, obliterating the knee that had just taken the bat. “Weren’t we making a family these past few months? Think that could’ve been holding  _ me _ back?”

“You can’t do this!” Carnage shrieked. 

Shriek shrugged. “Watch me, chicken.”

“You can’t spell ‘family’ without M-E,” Carnage spat, biomass struggling to knit his legs back together. “Without me, you’re a nobody, and you’ll stay like that until I kill you!”

“I see why you stick to calling me ‘pops’,” Venom said. “Any longer word would strain your strain your deprived grasp of orthography past its limit.”

Carnage swung his axe in a desperate lunge from his position on the floor. Venom parried the blow with the back of his fist.

“Wait, what the fuck is happening?” said the clown with the bat. He stumbled over his own feet as he backed away. “You’re Carnage!” There were screams all around them as people broke free of Shriek’s influence - there had been screams before, of course, but they were cries of pain and anger. These were cries of fear and confusion.

Carnage dragged himself to his feet with his symbiote’s tendrils. “You think you’re clever, Shriek? I think you’re about as quick on the uptake as Brains over here - and I’m about to make sure he never thinks again.”

“Hardly,” Venom said. They grabbed a handful of tendrils and yanked, ignoring how the razor-sharp edges cut into their hands. “They’d never let you have access to the kind of technology you’d need to turn him into a copy of you.” They swung Carnage overhead, smashing his skull into the floor of the ring. “Hear that? All hollow.”

A sonic blast caught them in the small of their back, sending them crashing into “Brains” and forcing them to let go of Carnage.

“I’ll take it from here, sweetcakes,” Shriek said. “I’ve never been one to let the in-laws interfere.” She grabbed Carnage by the scruff of his neck like a malformed cat.

“If you leave, we’ll kill you,” Venom said. “You cannot interfere in the justice system as you please. Both of you will face the music if we have any say in it.”

Shriek smirked. “That’s why I’m not asking.” She shot him in the chest again, and then she was gone, using her sonic flight to carry Carnage away to who knows what fate.

The final blow was more than they could take. The symbiote slipped away, dissolving until it was once more the unassuming clothes of Eddie Brock. Eddie spat the last remnants of green slime out of his mouth as he watched them disappear.

“Another miscarriage of justice,” he muttered. “Well, perhaps not necessarily,” he admitted grudgingly in response to his other. “A  _ Misery _ scenario between the two of them would be cathartic.” He crossed the ring towards the teens, who still clung to each other next to the corpse of a man he didn’t recognize. “Or perhaps Lizzie Borden would be more apropos.”

The boy came to his senses first. “You’re the man from the bus!”

“Correct,” Eddie said. “Do you require assistance?”

The teen shook his head. “No, just, I mean, you were trying to kill us earlier?”

“We would never harm innocents!” Eddie exclaimed. “But Carnage forced our hand - made us attack without adequate time to explain the situation. We admit it’s a bad habit, but long experience with Spider-Man has made us wary of the authorities’ so-called ‘help.’’’

“Uh,” the teen said. 

His female companion spoke up. “Take my purse. I’ve got like forty dollars in there. Get out of here, to Chicago at least.”

Eddie felt the warm glow of gratitude spread from the core of his other right beneath his sternum. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “Your alms will be put to good use.” His other withdrew the money and placed it with the rest of their stash. He preferred to let his other half handle the cash; pickpockets were much less likely to steal from a pocket that could grow teeth.

“Just go,” she said. “We’ve had a hell of a day.”

Eddie slung a web into the rafters and left them behind. “Where to now?” he asked his other. “Hound Shriek out of hiding, wherever she’s gone? Return home and put this behind us? What do you think?”

His other folded itself into the shape of a blank bus ticket. They kept debating all the way to the station. 


End file.
